=Place in the History of Comedy.=--In attempting to assign the place of _Gammer Gurtons Nedle_ in the history of the English drama, we should remember that it is the sole surviving example of the vernacular college comedies--probably more numerous than is commonly suspected--produced during the sixteenth century, and that most of the features which appear to us novel were doubtless the result of a gradual development. So far as our knowledge goes, however, it is the second English comedy conforming to the structural type which modern Europe has learned from the example of the Roman playwrights. The choice of the old "septenary" measure, in which most of the dialogue is written, may have been due to recollection of the Terentian iambic tetrameter catalectic, just as the rugged Alexandrines of _Ralph Roister Doister_ were probably suggested by the Latin comic senarius. But while in Udall's play the matter as well as the form is largely of classical origin, the plot and the characters of _Gammer Gurtons Nedle_ are purely native. Its material is drawn at first hand from observation of English life; its literary ancestry, so far as it has any, is mainly to be traced through John Heywood's interludes to the farces of the fifteenth-century mysteries, of which one brilliant example is preserved in the _Secunda Pastorum_ of the Towneley cycle. The artistic merit of the piece has often been unduly depreciated, from causes which it is not difficult to understand. The very rudimentary kind of humour which turns on physically disgusting suggestions is no longer amusing to educated people, and there is so much of this poor stuff in the play that the real wit of some scenes, and the clever portraiture of character throughout, have not received their fair share of acknowledgment. Most people who have lived long in an English village will recognise Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat as capital studies from life, though their modern representatives are not quite so foul-mouthed in their wrath as the gossips of the sixteenth century; and Hodge, whose name has become the conventional designation of the English farm labourer, is an equally lifelike figure. The brightly drawn character of Diccon represents a type which the working of the poor laws, and many social changes, have banished from our villages. But old people who were living down to the middle of this century had many stories to tell of the crazy wanderer, who was recognised as too feather-brained to be set to any useful work, but who was a welcome guest in cottage homes, and whose pranks were looked on with kindly toleration by well-disposed people, even when they led to inconvenient consequences.[651] The game of cross-purposes brought about by Diccon's machinations, which forms the plot, is humorously imagined, and worked out with some skill. It does not, of course, rise above the level of farce; but there is real comedy, not quite of the lowest order, in the scene where the fussy self-importance of Dr.